Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men

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I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept or if you have slept or if you have head ache or sciatica or leprosy or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace and not pollute the morning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
As to what are called the masses, and common men—there are no common men. All men are at last of a size.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such who are in the institution wish to get out; and such as are out wish to get in?

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of Right and Necessity. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
In certain men digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more ofthese drones perish, the better for the hive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full value, and not remain there in globes and spaces.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson